Due to the proliferation of information that has become necessary for and available to business and government, it has become advantageous to reduce the physical volume that certain forms of information occupy. For example, it may be particularly advantageous to preserve the information normally contained on index cards, individual pages of books, library cards or the like in a microfilm format. In this way, it is possible to store the information in a manner which is reproducible for subsequent viewing and which enables subsequent reproduction for the information by duplicating the original cards from the microfilm negatives. The present invention provides an apparatus whereby a plurality of original index cards or library cards or the like may be microphotographed automatically. The particular advantages of such a system would of course include the automatic rapid information retrieval of the information stored in the negatives as well as large savings in space that microphotograph negatives enjoy relative to the original cards. This of course minimizes the volume required to store the information which was originally contained on those cards. This is especially true in this invention where several cards are photographed simultaneously so that one frame of a microphotograph may contain the images of several cards.
Since it is desirable to photograph several cards at one time and since heretofore cards and pages of books have generally been manually arranged in the format in which they are to be photographed, an automatic means for arranging and spacing of the cards from each other has long been needed. Of course, where cards are automatically photographed in a desired sequence, it is also important that the desired sequence be preserved by an automatic filming machine both before and after photographing the cards to maintain file integrity.
Accordingly, one object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus adapted to photograph a plurality of cards on a single negative.
Another object of the present invention is to provide an apparatus which automatically arranges cards within a frame to be photographed.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a means for maintaining file integrity of the card file which is automatically photographed.
Yet another object is to provide means for determining the number of cards to be photographed at one time.
An object of the present invention is to also provide a means for selecting the spacing between individual cards of the frame to be photographed.
It is an object of the present invention to provide means for holding the cards flat and immovable in the focusing plane of the camera while being arranged and photographed.
It is an object of the present invention to provide means of aligning cards in a stack to sense the height of the cards in the stack and adjust that height relative to a card feeder.